| Cascading Style Sheets or CSS are the design side of | | | | on the page, the padding around it, as well as design |
| HTML. In other words Style Sheets are the clothing | | | | type and background within it. Once the portion is |
| you put over a web pages HTML to design fonts, | | | | defined it's just a matter of adding the name |
| colors, layouts, and the arrangement and separation | | | | leftNavigationBar to a div tag section of the HTML |
| of elements on the page. | | | | and everything in that div tag will be given those |
| In the past HTML used to include every aspect of a | | | | attributes. |
| web pages design but more recently the structure | | | | This new method is very concise as well as easy to |
| has moved to a separation of the design and the | | | | change or update. If you want the top header bar to |
| content itself. Without CSS you just have a skeleton | | | | be a different dimension you simply go into the Style |
| of links, text content, and images. | | | | Sheet and change it and it will be updated on every |
| Things like font, color, backgrounds, text size, and all | | | | single page you use that header in. If you want a |
| other aspects of design used to be implanted right | | | | different font in your side bar just go to the Style |
| into each individual HTML element of a page. Even | | | | Sheet definition of side bar and change its font |
| the HTML table tag which was originally intended | | | | attribute to whatever you want it to be. It couldn't |
| simply to add tables to a document became the | | | | be easier to update or read webpage sources. |
| source of overall structure where the entire page | | | | You still don't technically need CSS on your site you |
| was a very large table with many rows and columns | | | | can build any page without it. All the archaic methods |
| separating each section. This method of design would | | | | still work, and while the W3C and browser companies |
| often grow to be extremely large and complicated, | | | | don't guarantee the functionality of these types of |
| making the pages difficult to understand and nearly | | | | style tags in the future it is very unlikely they will |
| impossible to update or edit. | | | | ever actually get rid of them. even though you can |
| Today Style Sheets are the template you make for | | | | still build a site the old way, unless your site is |
| your sites overall design. Using CSS you can describe | | | | extremely simple i highly recommend learning and |
| certain portions of a site; say the leftNavigationBar, | | | | using CSS instead as it is much more adaptive for |
| then give that description properties like its position | | | | change. |